During the month of April, 2012, we are introducing the new webinar training series Navigating the Health Information Maze, developed for community college librarians wishing to hone their skills in medical research, consumer health, mobile technology, and outreach to special populations. One-hour sessions will be conducted every Tuesday in April, 12-1pm PDT, beginning April 3. Instructors include Kay Deeney, Kelli Ham, Stephen Kiyoi, and Lori Tagawa. The sessions will be recorded and made available on the PSR web site for anyone unable to attend. Details about each weekly session, along with a registration link, are available through the webinar web site listed above.

Please share this information widely with any community college librarians who may be interested in attending! Registration is required for participation, and priority will be given to community college librarians located in the Pacific Southwest Region. Stephen Kiyoi will be happy to answer any questions regarding the series.

PubMed now supports versioned citations. Revisions, scientific updates, and updates of reviews are examples of content that could be versioned. Versions are not intended for correcting specific errors in an article, for which published errata notices should continue to be used.

How Will Versions Be Identified?
The PMID of a versioned citation will remain constant while each version will have a unique version number assigned by PubMed. The combination of PMID and version number in the format PMID.version will be a unique identifier. All citations not versioned will be considered version 1. There may be occasions when a specific version will be deleted. In these cases, the version number assigned to the deleted version will be skipped, and the next version of the citation will be assigned the following number. Version numbers will not be reused.

Display of Versioned Citations in PubMed
Version information is noted on the Summary, Summary (text), Abstract, and Abstract (text), displays. On the Summary display, the version number is located before the journal title abbreviation. The article’s original publication date is retained, and the version publication date is enclosed in square brackets. The Summary (text) display has a similar format. The Abstract display also indicates the version number and version publication date. Users can easily access prior versions of the citation by clicking on the “Other versions” link. A menu will appear listing all versions with the corresponding publication date. The version currently being viewed is in grey text and is not a link. All other available versions are links that will take the user to the Abstract display for that version. The Abstract (text) display shows the version number and version publication date.

For more information, please read the NLM Technical Bulletin.

PubMed subject subset strategies are reviewed each year to determine if modifications are necessary. Modifications may include revisions due to changes in Medical Subject Heading (MeSH) vocabulary or MEDLINE journals, adding or deleting terms, and changing parts of a strategy to optimize retrieval. The following subset strategies were recently revised:

• AIDS
• Cancer
• Complementary Medicine
• History of Medicine
• Toxicology
• Veterinary Science

The National Library of Medicine website has updated their search result pages to spotlight selected NLM resources, including MedlinePlus and PubMed! Appearing as tabs at the top of the search results page, the spotlights include:

• “NLM Selected Resources” that highlights NLM products and services;
• “MedlinePlus Health Information” that highlights the most relevant MedlinePlus health topic; and
• “PubMed Citations” that highlights the first five article citations as returned by PubMed.

For example, searching for “asthma” in the NLM main website will retrieve the “Breath of Life” site in “NLM Selected Resources,” the “Asthma” health topic in “MedlinePlus Health Information,” and five article titles about asthma in “PubMed Citations,” in addition to the standard search results. The user may select one of the other tabs to display its contents in the spotlight.

For more information, please visit the NLM Technical Bulletin or search the NLM website!

The National Library of Medicine (NLM) National Training Center (NTC) is creating web based, self-paced tutorials related to the PubMed®, TOXNET®, and NCBI databases. Your input is needed regarding topics, length, and format of these tutorials! Please visit this survey to complete a short (10-15 minutes) questionnaire by close of business on Friday, February 17, 2012. The first 50 people to do so will receive a $10 Amazon.com gift certificate!

With its December update, PubMed Health grows to over 18,000 systematic reviews and health technology assessments in the last ten years. With the inclusion of the Database of Reviews of Effects (DARE) from the Centre for Reviews and Dissemination in England, PubMed Health is getting close to comprehensive coverage of reliable systematic reviews on clinical effectiveness.

Other new features and content additions in this release include:

• Evidence-based, regularly updated information on cancer for consumers and health professionals from the National Cancer Institute (NCI) Physician Data Query (PDQ) database.
• Two full-text books under “Understanding research results” from the “Understand clinical effectiveness” tab:

  Irwig L, et al. Smart Health Choices: Making Sense of Health Advice. London: Hammersmith Press; 2008. Available from: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK63638/

  Evans I, et al. Testing Treatments: Better Research for Better Healthcare. 2nd edition. London: Pinter & Martin; 2011. Available from: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK66204/

• Simplified and broadened display of medical encyclopedia search results.

For more information and screenshots of the December 2011 additions to PubMed Health, please visit NLM Technical Bulletin and PubMed Health.

The PubMed Advanced search page will soon be modified to provide users with a less cluttered, more intuitive way to build searches.

Highlights include:

• Terms entered in the builder will automatically populate the search box.
• Users may change the search field from the All Fields pull-down menu, and then enter terms in the search box.
• Terms entered in the builder will be added with the default Boolean operator AND, unless OR or NOT are chosen from the pull-down menu.
• Search field menu selections will be rearranged to display by category, e.g., date search fields will be listed together.
• The MeSH Terms field will also be enhanced to include an autocomplete feature.

For more information and screenshots of the new PubMed Advanced search page, please go to the NLM Technical Bulletin.

After it was announced in NN/LM PSR NewsBits  about a year ago, more than 90 libraries worldwide requested library-specific URLs for PubMed for Handhelds (PubMed4Hh). With the availability of smartphones growing rapidly, the PubMed for Handhelds team attempted to create an App for iOS devices (iPhone/iPad/iPod) but ran into some difficulty because of the many pre- and post-search algorithms in PubMed4Hh and also because of library-specific links.

We thought that the next best thing would be to add an icon to the Home screen and Dock to make it work like an App (a Web App). Instructions on how to add a PubMed4Hh icon to iOS devices are here. The URL above is also visible in PubMed4Hh’s index page (http://pubmedhh.nlm.nih.gov; or short URL http://go.usa.gov/xFb) to iOS and mobile devices but will not display in desktop and laptop browsers.

For Android devices, it is just a matter of adding a bookmark. NLM is currently creating specific instructions for Android devices that will be posted soon.

I hope this information will be useful for NN/LM librarians and their patrons.

from the PubMed for Handhelds team

My Bibliography will be enhanced to include a filter for the Award view display. Award view is only available to eRA Commons users with active grants in their portfolios. The Award view filter provides a method to view award data more clearly by giving you the ability to limit citation results by publication year(s), award number and publication type. For more information, please refer to the NLM Technical Bulletin.

LJI (List of Journals Indexed for MEDLINE) Subject Headings will no longer be displayed in LocatorPlus after November 18, 2011 and newly assigned LJI Subject Headings are not being added to LocatorPlus as of October 2011. The LJI Subject Heading is a MeSH term assigned by the National Library of Medicine (NLM) to MEDLINE journals to describe the journal’s overall scope. These currently appear in LocatorPlus records as Other Subjects in the Detailed View and as field 698 in the MARC View. The LJI Subject Headings selection in the Advanced Menu search will be removed. Serfile MARC records distributed to licensees will not contain 698 fields after November 18, 2011.

These overall scope subject headings will continue to be assigned to indexed serials and may be viewed and searched in the NLM Catalog by qualifying the search term with [st] or using the Advanced search limit of Broad Subject Term. Alternatively, you can browse these broad subject terms and run an NLM Catalog search by clicking on Broad Subject Terms from the NLM Catalog homepage. The LJI Subject Heading appears in the Full display with the label: Broad Subject Term(s). However, the element “Broad Journal Heading” will no longer be populated for licensees as part of the XML data in CatfilePlus or Serfile.

MeSH headings describing the specific scope of a journal will continue to be assigned and be searchable and viewable in both LocatorPlus and the NLM Catalog.

In January 2012, a new MARC 999 value of WDN will display in LocatorPlus for titles that have been withdrawn from the NLM collection. This means that withdrawn records will be identifiable both from the Holdings display and in the bibliographic record.

Questions or comments should be sent to custserv@nlm.nih.gov